DeepSeek opens V4-Flash-Vision: 305B multimodal weights, MIT license
First open-weight vision model in the V4 line: 13B active, agent-ready, ~155GB to self-host. Benchmark wins are vendor-only. Plus Claude Code fixes.
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The weights are live, and the license is plain MIT
DeepSeek pushed V4-Flash-Vision-Exp to Hugging Face on Aug 31 under a bare MIT license — no acceptable-use clause, no revenue cap, no monthly-user ceiling. You can self-host it, fine-tune it on private data, redistribute it, and even resell it as your own API without asking. The hosted API has been up since Aug 21; the open, ungated weights are the new part.
What you're actually running
It's 305B total parameters but only ~13B active per token (256 routed experts, 1M-token context), shipped in FP8. Budget roughly 155GB of VRAM at 4-bit or ~326GB native — a multi-GPU box, not a laptop, but far lighter than the 1.6T V4-Pro. Serve it with a one-line vLLM Docker image or an SGLang command straight from the repo.
First open multimodal you can point at documents
A dedicated vision tower ingests charts, screenshots, documents and photos at up to 384 tokens per image, built for mixed text-and-image agent work. That's the weekend unlock: a fully self-hosted document extractor, a chart reader, or a domain model — medical imaging, say — fine-tuned entirely on data that never leaves your servers.
The benchmark wins are real numbers — from DeepSeek
DeepSeek reports Terminal Bench 2.1 at 83.9, DeepSWE at 59.3 and Toolathlon-Verified at 75.9, and claims wins over Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on three of eleven boards. But the eval harness isn't published, so no outside lab can reproduce the scores yet — treat them as vendor marketing until third parties confirm.
Elsewhere: Claude Code 2.1.258 unbricks scheduled runs
Anthropic shipped a fast-follow that fixes remote and scheduled Claude Code sessions dying with a "user messages must have non-empty content" error after a re-sent permission approval, plus a regression that stopped it launching on macOS 12 Monterey. If you run Claude Code on a cron or on older macOS, update now.